Journalist, author, musician

Category: Panic

Up to the middle of the 19th century, cities were lit at night by gas lighting, candles, or flame — a soft, gentle radiance! But that changed around 1855 when electricians unleashed the first “arc lamps”, which were Promethean in their intensity.

“One could in fact have believed that the sun had risen,” a journalist wrote, reporting on scientific experiments with outdoor arc lighting in Lyon in 1855. “The light, which flooded a large area, was so strong that ladies opened up their umbrellas — not as a tribute to the inventors, but in order to protect themselves from the rays of this mysterious new sun.”

But not everyone was happy with this newfangled high-tech:

As demand for the technology grew, many resisted electricity’s brilliant new glow. It was just too bright. It lent a “corpse-like quality” to those subjected to its glare, one Londoner argued, and it could make a crowd look “almost dangerous and garish.” Robert Louis Stevenson penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1878, hoping to dissuade London’s authorities from installing obnoxious electric streetlamps like those in Paris. “A new sort of urban star now shines at nightly,” he wrote, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

Those damned millenials and their electricity. In a way, though, I can’t blame Stevenson. Version 1.0 of most technologies is often dreadful, and electric lighting was no different. Check out that picture above of New Orleans: Man, it looks like they’re walking around underneath an explosion. It reminds me of our current problems with low-energy lighting. I keep on buying super-efficient LED bulbs, but they always wind up making my house look like a surgical theater; I try to curl up with a book but it’s all horror-movie blue-spectrum pallor. They’ll eventually figure this out, but living through 1.0 of any new tech is always a pain.